Emulsifier and its types

What is an emulsifier? Its types and its use in industry

Drilling mud is undoubtedly one of the essentials of the drilling industry. The drilling mud circulation system has a significant contribution to the success of the drilling operation and it can be considered similar to the blood circulation system in the body, the tasks assigned to this system in drilling are as important as the blood circulation system and blood itself in the continuation of human life. In general, every drilling fluid has two main phases: continuous phase and discontinuous phase

Drilling muds are divided into the following groups based on their continuous phase:

1) Blue base flower

2) Oil base flower

3) gas base mud

To change and improve the properties of drilling mud, they add materials called drilling mud additives.

As you know, oil and water do not dissolve and they are called immiscible. If we shake the mixture of oil and water strongly, the two liquids will spread and form an emulsion. When an emulsion sits still for a while, the oil droplets begin to separate from the water. Emulsifier is used to stop this process. The emulsifier actually prevents the emulsion from breaking.

Emulsifiers have dual properties of lipophilic and hydrophilic. On the other hand, emulsions are either oil in water or water in oil. Oil-in-water emulsion is an emulsion in which small oil droplets form a dispersed phase and are dispersed in water, while in water-in-oil emulsion, small water droplets are dispersed in oil.

By adding an emulsifier to two liquids that are normally immiscible, the surface tension between the two phases is reduced and biphasization is prevented.

Therefore, two liquids will be able to form an emulsion. Since an emulsifier consists of water-soluble parts and oil-soluble parts, when it is added to a mixture of water and oil, the emulsifier is placed on the contact surface between these two liquids (water and oil) as a thin layer, so that the hydrophilic part It leans towards water and the lipophilic part towards oil. In the figure below, two types of water-in-oil and oil-in-water emulsions are schematically shown.